Policing the statistics

Last year, The Age published a story quoting police statistics that showed Sudanese and Somali-born Victorians were about five times more likely to commit crimes than the wider community. The statistics appeared to justify racial profiling of people from those communities, in order to cut crime rates.

Yet academics have consistently rejected a causal link between ethnicity and propensity to commit crimes, explains Associate Professor Steve James, a criminologist at University of Melbourne.

He says police statistics “tell us much more about how police behave than they do about the real rates of crime in the community”.

Some people and some crimes are more likely to be reported, policed and prosecuted, he says. Broad comparisons are fraught, too.

“The peak off ending period is young men between about 16 and 24. If you’ve got a bulge of that demographic in your population stats, then you’re going to have more crime.”

James Lombe Simon was born in Sudan and lives in Footscray. At the People’s Hearing, he spoke about the criminalising effect of those statistics.

“How does somebody trust me enough to give me a job, knowing that I might be five times morelikely to cause crime in their workplace? How will somebody let me rent their house?”

Victoria Police subsequently apologised for releasing the statistics, which were used in a briefing with community leaders. Chief Commissioner Ken Lay admits that it was “damaging” for the force’s public relations.

“This wasn’t about trying to demonise,” he says. “This was about trying to say, ‘Well how can you get better at preventing these young people falling into a life of crime?’, which we were worriedabout.”

But Professor James argues that the numbers, which relate to alleged off enders, are unreliable. He says better evidence came from the Victoria Police LEAP database (which records officers’ interactions with people) during the racial discrimination case settled earlier this year.

Those records revealed that young African-Australian men in Flemington were two-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched, even though they committed relatively fewer crimes than young men of other ethnic backgrounds. A statistician for the police accepted these findings.